Understanding Your Company's Global Business Requirements

Imagine that your company tells you that it wants to market the software it develops to four other countries and wants the applications to run in the languages of those countries. How do you start? What do you need to consider to make sure that the new product development effort is successful? What do you need to think about when customizing Siebel Business Applications for this purpose?

Although you must take your company's unique business requirements into consideration in your planning, this guide offers tips and guidelines for undertaking a global product rollout and maintenance in general, as well as configuring the Siebel Business Applications in particular.

By addressing the following questions concerning your organization's global business needs, you will have gone a long way towards planning for your global deployment of Siebel Business Applications:

Will your company have one central business location from which all business transactions originate, or regional decentralized (distributed) locations for transactions?

If decentralized, does your company need to keep the transactions synchronized, for example, banking transactions?

Will remote users synchronize their transactions to a central corporate database or a regional database?

Which language will be the base, or primary, language with which you begin your development and customization process? The first language installed is the primary language.

Have you previously customized any language files from a previous version of Siebel Business Applications, or configured a new language not yet offered for Siebel Business Applications?

Languages previously provided for Siebel Business Applications can be upgraded. If you previously localized into a language that Siebel Business Applications now provide directly, you must either merge your previous use of this language with the Siebel language, or keep them separate.

Which locales are the languages intended for (for example, French-speaking Canada or France)?

Which locale settings will be needed as a result? The answer to this will affect the way currency, numbers, dates, and times are formatted in the software.

Because additional Siebel Application Object Managers will be needed for each locale/language, determine in advance the implications for memory and performance of the products you use.

What character set will you use for your database—a Unicode or a non-Unicode character set?

This decision has far-reaching implications for the ease with which your organization can deploy globally. If you do not implement a Unicode database, then you may not be able to support all languages which your business uses. In that case, you will not be able to roll up data from those countries into your Siebel applications, or into a data warehouse.

Are there legacy interfaces that you need to consider in your planning and do these have implications for your back-office applications? In which code page is the data of your back-office applications expected? Is there a need to convert between code pages, such as from Unicode to non-Unicode?

Who will localize your customizations?

Do you have particular legal requirements you must meet within your global network (for example, as regards European Union Data Protection Directives, Basel II, or others)?